2020 Frederick Jackson Turner Award
“Crying the News is a magisterial treatment of journalism, child labor, business practices, gender differences, and social change in America from the early nineteenth century through the 1970s. The reader is reminded that those who cried the news in the analog era were the forerunners of Twitter, Instagram, and other systems of information alert. The boys and girls tasked with this labor manufactured events and sold newspapers, they learned the value of organized labor, survived the vicissitudes of economic cycles, endured harassment and deprivation, experienced the sting of racial and gender bias, and informed the nation.”
2020 Philip Taft Book Prize
“Vincent DiGirolamo’s Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys is a massive work, lifting ‘newsies’ far above pop culture and placing them squarely at the center of working-class history. Examining changing forms of newspaper delivery from the 1830s to the 1930s, DiGirolamo’s work places these ubiquitous workers back into their changing family economies and demonstrates how newsboys’ labor shaped youth culture, organized unions, and contributed to the expansion of America’s newspaper industry.”
2019 Frank Luther Mott – Kappa Tau Alpha Research Book Award
“DiGirolamo’s book offers an unprecedented history of newsboys in America, revealing the central role they played in the country’s economic, cultural and social development over more than 100 years. He brings together extensive research, a rich theoretical knowledge gracefully deployed in the story line, and amazing language skills to produce a book that is a tremendous contribution to the history of journalism.”
2020 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism
Awarded annually since 2017 by the American Historical Association to the author of the most outstanding book published in English on any aspect of the history of journalism, concerning any area of the world, and any period.
“In exploring the exigencies of the newspaper industry and capitalism’s exploitation of child workers, Vincent DiGirolamo’s meticulously researched study traces ‘young toilers in the cause of truth,’ starting from the first anonymous enslaved boy who handed out the news in the American colonies through to the last youth newspaper hawkers found at the end of the ‘American Century.’ DiGirolamo masterfully contributes to debates in childhood studies, labor and economic history, and media history.”
2020 Presidential Excellence Award for Scholarship
Conferred annually on outstanding Baruch College faculty for distinguished teaching, scholarship and research, or service. It is a recognition of dedication and passion by one’s peers.
2021 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize
Awarded in odd-numbered years since 2009 by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) for the best book treating any aspect of United States history in the period 1865-1920. It must be the author’s first book.
“Crying the News has many virtues: it manages to be a labor history and a history of capitalism, a history of childhood, an urban history, and a cultural history of the news industry all in one. It sensitively brings to light the experiences, struggles, and influence of a massive group of child laborers who walked the streets of our cities and towns, often unseen if rarely unheard, for more than a century. While its chronological range is substantial– from the 1830s to the 1940s– the Gilded Age and Progressive Era figures centrally in the book’s analysis. It is clearly and beautifully written, based in very impressive research, and manages to tell a coherent and powerful story while always maintaining awareness of broader culture context.”